Verisimilitude.

Verisimilitude: noun - the quality of seeming to be true or real.

As I've commented in the past, one of the hallmarks of a good science fiction author is the ability to extrapolate from a development or event to a future in which that development has created an unexpected result. My standard example is a writer in the 1930s who is able to look at the newly popular horseless carriage or "car" for short, and somehow make the leap of imagination to cloverleafs, traffic jams, oil wars, and road rage shootings.

That being said, previous to the events of the last two years, I would have been surprised if I read a novel set in a pandemic apocalypse, and the author described a situation where a significant percentage of the population refused the preventative vaccine.  Similarly, I wouldn't have expected those people to vigorously protest the vaccine process itself, along with objecting to mask mandates, vaccine passports, and all the other controls and safeguards recommended by the medical community and set in place by the government in hopes of controlling the virus. Who could have imagined that as a believable scenario?

 

And yet, someone came close to calling it.

Capitol Hill was in a state of uproar over the Plague. National policy was non-existent. Some states were quarantining Plague victims, other were doing nothing. Some states were testing people at their borders, other were calling this a violation of the Constitution. Some Representatives were calling for a national health identity card, others considered this a civil rights outrage. Christian groups were calling for a national quarantine policy. Plague victims rights groups were calling for an end to all restrictions on their free movements. Dozens of test cases were moving ponderously towards the Supreme Court.

The quote is from Norman Spinrad's satiric short novel Journals of the Plague Years, originally published in 1988*. The concept is an homage to Daniel Defoe's 1722 book A Journal of the Plague Year, a first-person narrative of the events of the bubonic plague in 1665 London. Spinrad's story focuses on a different plague from the 80s: Acquired Immuno-Deficiency Syndrome, more commonly known as AIDS. In Spinrad's story, AIDS has become a virulent menace that has decimated the population of the United States.  The general population no longer has sex with other people, only mechanical substitutes, and San Francisco has become a combination prison/palliative hospice for the infected.

Spinrad's ability to predict the same sort of chaos and lack of logic that surrounded the COVID-19 response is brilliant.  Unfortunately, it also demonstrates that someone was able to look at that kind of a scenario and anticipate exactly the way things would unfold - kind of a sad statement about human nature.

- Sid 

* Astute readers will recall this book from my guide to what not to read during a pandemic - ironically, since that posting I've now read it.